Political Parties

So some idiots decided to challenge Washington State's blanket primary, and that resulted in the primary being declared unconstitutional for no good reason. See, according to the judges who idiotically decided this, political parties are more important than individual voters. Which sucks, but it's the way the system works.

Anyway, because of this stupidity, the blanket primary is gone forever. The major political parties have managed to pull one over on the voters and take away voter choice in the primaries forever.

The question now is what will replace the primary. Unfortunately, there is no option that allows voters real choice. All the options either involve being forced to choose a party (and thus support the very scumbags that took away our choice) or with I-872, to narrow down the choices in the general election to an unacceptable level.

There are also options for "instant runoff" elections, but the nature of such elections makes them difficult to implement and unlikely to be understood by the average voter.

Perhaps we should just outlaw political parties in Washington State. Say you can't belong to a party, but you can have the endorsement of one (or more). None of those crappy "R"s and "D"s after somebody's name, just the name of the wannabe politico. As tempting as that is, it's a really stupid idea too, isn't it?

I don't like the initiative to go to a top two primary... but it does seem like the least objectionable of the options currently out there. We already would have that for our primary if we didn't have a moral wimp for a Governor. I don't know if I'll be voting for it... but I know what we have at the moment is crap.

A very large part of me is for abolishing primary elections entirely. If the political parties are so intent on hijacking our vote, then maybe we should just take the ability away from them entirely. It would save the state a lot of money... and with this awful Bush economy that's nothing to sneeze at. Some people fear that it would limit Washington State's voice in the decision-making processes of the parties... so what? If I believed that the internals of the parties weren't already rigged beyond redemption, I might care. But they are already so screwed up, not having our input simply makes no difference.

And for a final note: As far as I'm concerned, being forced to register for a party in order to vote - to have your affiliation be made part of the public record - is unconstitutional and ought to be banned throughout the United States. It's immoral to insist that people belong to a party. It's contrary to the very idea of having a secret ballot. It values the political parties over the individual voter. It's wrong.